The present invention generally relates to battery management systems, and more specifically, battery management systems for optimizing and extending the service life of a battery.
Data operations (data processing, management, analysis, etc.) have become a key component of modern business and in industries from banking to online retail and from insurance to airlines. Often, these data operations are critical to the operation of the company and any downtime can lead to losses of millions or billions of dollars in revenue. Businesses use large IT equipment (such as, but not limited to, the mainframe) to perform these data operations and since the operations are mission critical, the IT equipment itself is mission critical and must not experience downtime.
Large IT equipment in a data center environment is run off of main power lines. In the event of a loss of power from the main line, backup generators will turn on to continue providing power to the data center and to all of the IT equipment contained within. However, there can be a lag time between the loss of the main line power and the start of the generators during which the IT equipment will not be functioning. For mission critical applications and IT equipment this lag time is unacceptable so mission critical IT equipment will have an inline battery backup system to ensure that the system always has a source of power, even during the time between a failure of the main line power and the start of the generator (typically 30 seconds or less).